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Ives's Seasonal Songs, Warren Kimball

LSU Master's Theses

Throughout his career, Charles Ives composed eight songs on texts that in some manner concern the yearly seasons. Unexamined by scholars to any depth, and never heretofore considered as a group, these pieces have typically been treated in tandem with Ives’s other songs about nature. Studied as a set, however, they reveal the theme of seasonal change to be an artistic topic of significant, enduring appeal to the composer. Although these pieces are stylistically diverse, examining them as a group helps us to better understand Ives’s maturation as a composer, the seasonal topic serving usefully as a constant around which …